A leading Abstract Expressionist painter in post-World War II New York, Willem de Kooning worked with abstract figuration throughout the 1940s and early 1950s, combining bold coloration and brushwork with fragmented, disjunctive Cubist forms and grid-like structures. The same kinds of slashing strokes, rich colors, and dynamic compositions from these images were further explored here in Saturday Night, but with a non-objective, or non-representational, language. Exemplifying Abstract Expressionist gestural painting with its loose, visible brushwork, Saturday Night conveys a sense of intense energy and immediacy, suggesting city blocks or the congested clutter of buildings in urban spaces with its network of vertical and horizontal lines. Paintings like this demonstrate what the American critic Harold Rosenberg called "action painting." For Rosenberg, this type of painting emphasized the process of creation, which constituted a momentary search for self-fulfillment amidst the chaos of modern life, metaphorically symbolized through the powerful brushstrokes and fragmented, dissonant, and often vulgar forms and colors. The emphasis on process in the work of de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and others later influenced such postmodern practices as "happenings" and conceptual art, which stressed artistic ideas and acts. While pointing to postmodern tendencies, images such as Saturday Night were largely hailed as signs of America's triumph over modernist European painting and New York's new position as the cultural capital of the West in the postwar period.